the messy, good-smelling kitchen. “When you fellas come?” She was wearing a heavy sweater and a silver cross, her face close to mine. I smelled scented soap, the kind that hurt your nose and told animals exactly where your traps were set under the snow.
“Today,” I said. “Before the plane came.” Two hours ago, I realized, startled at how minutes of pain and people formed mountain ranges across my past, memory peaks that normally took months to rise.
Melt, Janet’s husband, spoke in Iñupiaq though he knew well that even his children couldn’t understand most of the words. Naluaġmiu peppered his guttural complaints. We kids stood beside the stove, eyes lowered, chewing pieces of Iris’s gum. Trying to avoid any naluaġmiu-like movements.
“Adii, you kids chewing loud!” he shouted.
Our jaws stopped. We all swallowed. The barrel stove glowed red, searing our overpants. The fling of warmth wasn’t enough to thaw ice on the floor in the corners. Piles of socks, gloves, and clothes—and leaning guns—were frozen fast to the frosty walls. The temperature at the ceiling was breathtaking, fifty or sixty degrees warmer than the floor.
“Enuk go check his snares,” Janet said, catching my searching glance. I nodded, too discouraged with my luck on this long-anticipated town trip to ask if he might return that night.
Stevie and Dawna surged in the door, laughing at a joke they’d left outside. Tommy Reason followed. Everyone called him Treason. He was curly-haired, a boy Janet had taken in when his mother burned in the plane crash at Uktu. His dad had run off, long gone back to the States, maybe dead. Once when Lumpy pinched a strip of his skin off with a vise grips Treason cried for a long time, more than a vise grips’ worth. Treason didn’t tease about us being naluaġmiu, or anything about hair.
My face was hot with shame. Places with people always came with this—the reminder that my family was different from people. We didn’t say hi correctly, or stand right, chew properly—especially we didn’t know enough about fighting. And there were so many people, and names, and faces impossible to remember. I dropped my eyes and vanished into fantasy where I’d created Elvis Jr.’s lip scar by hitting him so hard that newspapers out in Fairbanks printed the account.
Stevie dragged me into the corner. He kicked clothes piles out of our way. He nudged his glasses up. He was big-boned and stocky. His coal-black hair swept back, thick and wavy. Beside his family I knew I looked like a diseased seagull among glossy ravens. Stevie had been born thirty-eight days before me, but for most of my life I’d felt older than both him and Dawna—maybe because Janet enjoyed babies. Abe had strongly suggested we skip the “whining years.” He had sewn the sleeves of our first caribou parkas shut so he didn’t have to hear or worry about lost mittens.
“Junior fight you?” Stevie didn’t ask who won. Stevie was like Janet. He had a way of smiling, unconcerned as a shrug. Kids who had wanted to fight him would ask if they could help feed his dogs.
“Yeah.” I covered my lip. Dawna’s mirror hung on a nail in the dark corner. Fly specks freckled my reflection. Worried blue eyes stared back.
Dawna giggled. “You fellas get your vanilla and nuts?”
Treason stood next to us. “Ever’body been try fight lots since that good movie.”
“Which one was that?”
“Ninja one,” Stevie explained.
I nodded, mystified.
“Cutuk, you want to see our new kinda snowgo?”
“What? You guys got a new snowgo?” I tried to clamp my expression, but the suddenness of the information smeared jealousy across my face. I wanted to hide behind the woodpile. Never in a hundred years would we have a motorized snowmobile. Abe didn’t like engines. Maybe they reminded him of his dad’s Super Cub. Not so many years ago only privileged people had snowmobiles: schoolteachers, Tommy Feathers, and a few others.
Stevie and I ran out without parkas. Stevie peeked in the window, cautious, making sure Melt wasn’t looking out. It paid to be careful around Melt. Stevie led me behind the house. He flung aside a canvas tarp. He rubbed his hands. The snowgo crouched, silver blue in the sleek moonlight, a rocket waiting to burn across the tundra. He traced the name POLARIS on the cowling with his fingers.
“Not like that old Chaparral,” he said in awe. “This new one always go fast.” His breath rose in fat clouds. “It was have windshield, but Lumpy let it come off on tree. Dad sure wanna tie him to post and whip him. Only thing he’s too big now.”
A jagged crack ran down the front. I touched the glassy cowling and jerked my hand back. “I got a splinter!” A dot of blood darkened my finger.
Stevie gripped my hand. “That’s fiberglass. Try see. Wait! We’ll be blood brothers!” He poked his finger and squeezed it to mine. “Wish for snowgos, bart. Lumpy gonna try get Pipeline job an’ buy one. Lotta people going Prudhoe.”
Lust cramped my hands. I saw my long-wished-for equalizer, a mechanical creation that would transform me into a great hunter and an Eskimo. “We gotta go Prudhoe? What’s Prudhoe anyways?”
“You drive snowgo before?”
I accosted my memory, attempting to adjust the truth—and avoid a lie. “No. Not yet.”
“That’s okay. You will sometimes. It go faster than any kinda dog, wolf, caribous.” He shook his head. “Nothing can win it. Dad get wolf. He run right over it.” We stared at the machine. Then he covered it and showed me the wolf skin draped frozen over the clothesline. It was skinned poorly; there were slashed holes and the lower legs and claws had been left behind with the carcass.
“We see lotta wolves up home, whole packs,” I bragged in the dark, “but Abe never try kill ’em. Coupla’ winters ago he left me one time to watch a moose we killed, and wolves—”
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“Why Abe never always shoot ’em?” Stevie pulled at his eyebrow.
“He likes them.”
“What he always like ’em for?”
“I dunno. I—I think he just likes ’em.”
“Huh.” Stevie shrugged and flashed me a baffled look as he opened the door. In that moment it seemed preposterous that at home Abe’s reasoning could have held its knots. Why couldn’t he be normal and shoot whole clotheslines full?
THAT NIGHT WE HAD STEW that wasn’t caribou or bear or lynx or anything ordinary; it came out of a big can that Melt brought when he wandered home from slumping around the Native Cache stove. Melt was short and well padded with a square head, perfectly adapted for sitting in the rocking chair Abe had made for him, while Janet cooked, skinned animals, cut up meat, and sewed. Whiskey had melted the teeth out of Melt’s head and left a sinkhole of his lips. He dunked pilot crackers in his coffee and stuffed them in. He liked to preach sometimes at the church, when there was no pastor in town. He was grumpy except when he shared advice, weather prophecies, or his hunting stories—those things brought out a generosity in him. It was clear that they were better than any another person might own.
He was proud to serve that
